Mission statement: On this blog we explore why homeschooling can be a better option for children and families than a traditional classroom setting. We'll also explore homeschooling issues in general, educational thoughts, family issues, and some other random stuff.

Monday, July 30, 2012

I am Vincent Cate, one of Henry's brothers. I live in Anguilla, a small island in the Caribbean. The private school here is asking me for nearly 3 times as much money for next year as I paid last year. I have decided it is time to start homeschooling.

There is no private school for 7th to 12th grades in Anguilla. A number of parents send their children to the next island at great cost and extra time for the children. If I can get computers to do most of the teaching I may be able to start a school and get some paying students and make some extra money. I am wondering if computers can do most of the education for junior high and high school age students, so that one teacher might have 10 or 20 students even when they are at different ages. My plan is to start with just my two older boys (ages 9 and 11 in Sept) for the fall. After this, if I think I can handle another 10 kids, and if I can get a school license, then maybe expand in January.

I am a Libertarian atheist. I don't want a religious
education for my kids, nor one that makes it seem like big government is
a good thing.

The Calvert School seems very good but when I spoke with them they seemed to strongly believe that humans have to do the teaching, not computers. I think they are wrong and that computers can be very good teachers and are the future of teaching.

I have been impressed with or had recommended to me the following computer based education. We are already at the point that students learn much faster with many of these than sitting in a normal class with 10 or 20 other students listening to a teacher. The software and online videos will keep getting better.

It seems that K12 provides a good general education where the computer does most of the teaching. My current thinking is that K12 will be our main source with the others above as extras. I am looking for any feedback anyone can give. Does my plan seem reasonable? Are the above sources ok for a Libertarian atheist? Are there others you can recommend?

My daughter commented to me that the kids didn't get to talk much during
lab that day because they were so busy counting the drops of chemicals
for each step in the experiments. She was also happy that we kept the garage door open for ventilation.

While there are 14 sections in the kit, the first three are the most time intensive. We have 4 more days left (20 hours) and we hope to complete the majority of the kit in that time. However, we haven't been rushing it. We are focusing on quality not quantity of experiments.

Next month our oldest daughter will be starting full time at a local junior college. As I wrote earlier, this was a bit hard for us. I had previously thought that our daughter, like most students, would go away to college.

----------For American students, heading off to college has traditionally also meant physically going away to college. But now, at a time when college costs are soaring, and when news of young people being saddled with burdensome student loan debt is unavoidable, today’s students are trying to trim college expenses in every way possible. More than half of students, in fact, will be living at home when the fall semester begins—up significantly from the 43% of students who commuted a couple of years ago.

The just-released report from Sallie Mae shows that in a “major shift in spending,” college students themselves are paying a larger percentage of the total amount for their educations lately. Using their savings and income, undergrads spent $2,555 on average for their educations during the last academic year, up from $1,944 the previous year. Parents, by contrast, have been contributing less for their children’s college bills: $5,955 last year, down substantially from $8,752 two years prior. In total, parents footed 37% of college costs via spending or borrowing, compared to 44% of their children’s college expenses four years before. Students themselves account for 30% of the total cost of attendance, up from 24% four years earlier.
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Thursday, July 26, 2012

It has been another lovely day of experiments. We've finished sections I and II and then began section III of the CK01A Standard/Honors Home School Chemistry Laboratory Kit by Home Scientist LLC. It took us 20 hours of lab time to get this far. The teacher has allowed the kids to take extra time to explore and repeat steps as needed.

We've had a few technical difficulties. Even with the extension cord into the kitchen with the kitchen lights off and an extension cord into the outside outlet for the lawn mower, we still blew a fuse. But, only once. Also, we had problems with the digital multimeters. The teacher and some of the students brought meters from home that they already owned. Not one of them worked properly because the meters had been sitting in drawers for some time and needed new batteries. That took us a day to figure out.

The kids are having a great time. I'm excited to see how much of the kit we can complete in the 9 days of class (5 hours per day) we've scheduled.

----------How did Christopher Paolini, a homeschooler from Montana, become one of the world’s best-selling authors? The story of his remarkable career has appeared in The Writer magazine of May 2012 in the form of an interview and also in an illustrated article in Rolling Stone magazine of March 1, 2012 by freelancer Amanda Fortini. Indeed, if you type in his name in Google search, you’ll find that he has already become a world literary celebrity.

It appears that Christopher, now 28, who still lives with his parents, started writing his first fantasy novel at the age of 15. He got his inspiration from reading J.R.R. Tolkien, E.R. Eddison, and Anne McCaffrey. His family liked the story and decided to publish it themselves as a homeschool family business. It took them a year to prepare the book for publication. The book, Eragon, was published in 2001, when Christopher turned 18.

Living in Montana’s Paradise Valley, the family then spent the next year promoting the book, taking Christopher to libraries, bookstores, and schools around the Western states, building a fan base among young readers. To attract readers, Christopher wore a medieval costume consisting of a red swordsman shirt, black pantaloons, knee-high boots, a black pirate sash, and a black beret. He spent eight hours a day talking to every person who came in the store. Thus, thefamily was able to sell 10,000 copies of the book. But it was barely enough to pay the family’s bills.
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

We are still blowing fuses. Today, we ended up running one extension cord into the kitchen (with the kitchen lights off) and another outside to the outlet for our electric lawn mower.

We leave the garage door open some of the class time and are getting a little attention from people passing by. My neighbor told me that a squad car cruised past our house a couple of times checking us out. I got to thinking that we kind of do look like a meth lab. ;)

Things are going so well that we are thinking ahead for next year. Most of the students in our little camp will be studying physiology/anatomy next year. We hope to find an equally good lab program for that.

----------“Homeschooling”. To some, the word might conjure up images of un-socialized nerds. To others, it might inspire dreams of perfect students, sitting at the table eagerly learning everything they’re taught and clamoring for more. To most of us, we probably see everything — from the struggles of teaching children of all ages, to the pleasure of watching an older child teaching his sibling. From weariness brought on by bad attitudes and scuffling, to the joy of seeing your children grow strong in the faith, homeschooling parents see it all. Welcome to the July 24 edition of The Carnival of Homeschooling!
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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Today's lab went very similar to yesterdays. However, we blew two fuses this time. One in the garage and one in the kitchen. We discovered that when we run the extension cord into the kitchen, we need to turn off the kitchen lights. ;)

We have also extended out our time to 5 hours per meeting instead of 4 1/2. When we were in the planning stages, 4 1/2 hours seemed too long. But, now it doesn't seem long enough.

Monday, July 23, 2012

As I mentioned in Lab Sciences, providing chemistry lab experience is a bit of a challenge for homeschoolers like us.

Today, was the first day of my Do-it-yourself Chemistry Lab Camp. We got off to a good start. We have 12 homeschool high school students meeting in my one car garage.

The kids did well and had a good time. I had been a little worried
that 4.5 hours was going to be too much at one sitting. It helped that
we had a master teacher and a short 15 minute break with snacks in the middle.

The only real problem we had was the circuit breaker. The outlet on the ceiling for the garage door couldn't handle the two hot plates, hair dryer and desk lamp. We ended up running an extension cord into the kitchen.

And speaking of kitchens, the moms who stayed hung out and discussed politics while I cleaned my beautifully remodeled kitchen.

I'm also really glad we kept our old refrigerator in the laundry room. It is a great place to store today's experiments on recrystallization.

Friday, July 20, 2012

-----------On Tuesday Via Meadia reported that the Coursera program for online education has just expanded its offerings. Along with programs like MIT’s EdX and Stanford’s Udacity, Coursera offers lectures from professors presented in video format, supplemented by online coursework and reading materials. Other institutions are looking to offer hybrid coursework, in which online classes are supplemented by semi-regular meetings with professors or tutors of some sort, to minimize the time required of professional staff while retaining the advantage of face time with an instructor.

Yet for all the fanfare, many people, particularly professors and students, are not yet convinced. Can a set of online videos and computer programs really be as effective as actual professors? According to a new and purportedly rigorous study comparing test results of students taking the same course online and in person, the answer may be yes. The Wall Street Journal reports:
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After quoting from the WSJ article the post continues with another interesting thought:

-----------This also serves as a reminder that even though the American university system sometimes seems full of obstructionists and slow to move, it’s actually moving much faster than most of its rivals overseas. What’s more, these changes tend to accelerate once they get under way.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

----------Twelve-year-old Oladimeji Elujoba kept getting into fights at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown. Every time the teacher took attendance in the morning, she would stumble over his polysyllabic name and inadvertently elicit jeers and giggles from his classmates.

“I’m not the kind of person to watch people laugh at me,” Elujoba, now 17, says matter-of-factly.

And so he fought. He fought so much he got in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, after-school detentions. His parents, Ruth and Olalekan Elujoba, worried.

“One of the teachers in the middle school called me,” Olalekan Elujoba recalls. “They had suspended him and said that if I don’t take any action on this, I will spoil the boy’s future. I couldn’t sleep that night.”

Within a few weeks, Olalekan Elujoba had decided what to do. His two sons, Oladimeji and Kunle, later followed by his daughter, Comfort, would go to boarding school.
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I hope more parents find out about the option of homeschooling. It would be a lot cheaper than sending your children to a boarding school in another country, and better for the family.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Our family
has experienced a lot of changes this year. The first six months have
been pretty packed. For example, our oldest will soon be 18 years old and will "graduated" from Cate Academy. Our youngest will begin Kindergarten at Cate Academy.

This spring we moved out of our home for three months while our house underwent a major remodel. (Even two months later I’m still reaching for the light switches where they used to be.)

I took my son on his first Fathers and Sons camp out.

My work has had some major changes (long story, don't ask) in the
first six months of 2012.

Homeschoolers
are used to change. We are frequently in
a state of flux. Our plans may change
from moment to moment. So, sit back and enjoy the show while we look at some of the "changes" in this week's Carnival of Homeschooling.

Basic Change

Life is often
changing, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Mystie reminds us in Real Life that
interruptions are the point, from Simply
Convivial.

Sometimes
people think that learning stops when school is out for the summer. In When Does
Learning Stop? Chris reminds us that we learn every day and through that
learning we expand our horizons. It is important to help our children
experience the joy of learning in different ways so that they will be energized
with the quest! Posted at: Home
School vs. Public School.

Crafting With Kids:
Summer Tie-Dye! shows off a families
a tie dye extravaganza just before Independence Day. They had fun, and the
shirts were the talk of the neighborhood as they dried on hangers from the
dogwood in front of the house. Posted
at: So Crafty.

Regena
explains that Sensory
Boxes offer a terrific, hands-on way to explore a large variety of
subjects. They are generally set up to
stimulate various senses; work large and fine motor skills; and teach
patterning, sequencing, counting, colors, and so forth.
Posted at: Green Apple’s
Blush.

And for our
humble entry to the carnival, Janine writes about her Summer
Reading and reflects on lessons about homeschooling she’s learned over the last
thirteen years and her goals for the next year.
Posted at: Why Homeschool.

If you have enjoyed this carnival, please spread the word. Please
mention the carnival on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, and other appropriate
places. You can also help promote the carnival by adding the carnival images.
Learn how by going here.

Summer is a great time to research and reading before my life gets crazy/busy in the fall. Right now I'm reading 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum by Cathy Duffy. So far I like it a lot. However, I'm reading it on my iPhone so the graphs are too tiny to read. I will need to get a hard copy to see what I'm missing.

Here's a great quote from the book:

It doesn't take long to figure out that veteran homeschoolers are, overall, very independent and strong-minded parents. Chances are you could poll half a dozen such moms and discover they have half a dozen different ways they homeschool. There is no single right way to homeschool that everyone figures out after a few years.

It sure would be easier if there was "a single right way to homeschhool." Over the last 13 years, I've ebbed and flowed back and forth between Classic and Unschooling with some Montessori thrown in for flavor. When I'm in a Classic mode, I feel guilty for missing out on the richness that comes from spontaneous discovery learning more typical of unschooling. When I'm in a Unschooling phase, I feel guilty that we are not doing enough math worksheets and structured lessons.

Each year, about this time, I start making plans so that this year will be different. I think to my delusional self, "This year, I'm going to have the perfect curriculum." (I know this is a fantasy, but it is nice while it lasts).

I say this is delusional because there is no perfect curriculum or
perfect children for that matter either. Things have been good and
things have been good enough, but that doesn't stop me from tweaking
things

I don't want to give the wrong impression either. My kids have done well in their academic studies, just not has well as my fantasies (full ride scholarship to an Ivy League School). In the end, I'm happy with who they are becoming.

I have one student leaving our "homeschool" and one student entering. I have to admit that kindergarten is not my favorite stage. My soon to be kindergartener is cut from a different cloth and is a boy. I'm expecting that many of the things I used with his three older sisters are not going to work.
Hopefully, this book will give me some good suggestions on how to navigate in my new reality.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

----------I always get such great input when going through the Carnival of Homeschooling – and even more so when I have the priviledge of hosting the Carnival!
Read on to add some more wonderful tools to your pile!
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Tuesday, July 10, 2012

It is great to have friends when one is young,
but indeed it is still more so when you are
getting old. When we are young friends are,
like everything else, a matter of course.
In the old days we know what it means to have them.
-Edvard Grieg

----------My three children and I were standing in line at the grocery store the other day, and a woman behind us started conversing with my thirteen year-old daughter Grace. At some point in the conversation, I overheard the woman ask Grace what grade she was in and what school she attended. Grace responded innocently that she was homeschooled, and that she wasn’t exactly sure what grade she would be in if she went to school. The woman looked over Grace’s shoulder and directly into my eyes. She wrinkled her brow and asked me, very casually, with perhaps a hint of skepticism, ?So, why do you homeschool??

Why do we homeschool? My wife Shelly and I have homeschooled our three children for the past 10 years, and in our experiences, people such as old friends, new neighbors, relatives, and even total strangers have asked this rather large and complicated question in a nonchalant and often cynical manner. I’m certain most homeschooling parents would agree that responding to the ?why? question is not something that can be accomplished succinctly or casually. After all, the question is big. Really BIG.

Unlike many homeschooling parents, however, I am also asked "why?" regularly by teachers, school administrators, university faculty members, and education graduate students. I represent one of those conflicted homeschooling parents whose professional experiences are rooted in public education. In fact, both my wife and I began our educational careers in the classroom. Shelly was a primary grade teacher, and I taught junior high school science. After spending almost 10 years teaching in the public school classroom and attending graduate school, I acquired a great deal of valuable educational experiences while earning degrees in the fields of educational media and instructional technology. These fields of study are defined by many ?why? questions related to learning and instruction, and since graduating I have been involved in a variety of research projects designed to find answers to instruction-related problems. In addition, I have taught university courses and worked as an educational consultant in the areas of evaluation and instructional design. Although I have grappled with a variety of teaching and learning problems throughout my professional experiences, the question ?Why do you homeschool?? has been one of the most difficult education-related question for me to answer truthfully. In fact, over the years I have developed no less than four different types of answers.
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My brother told me about KickStarter.com. It is a cool idea. People pitch their proposals and other people donate money. KickStarter.com is just the middle man. There are a lot of interesting projects. For example here are two from the technology category which interest me:

----------In Two-Fer, Bolick provides historical context by assessing the Supreme Court’s record. He finds that over the past two decades, the Supreme Court has lived up to its intended role of curbing government power and protecting individual rights. He also writes that the next president “has the potential to heavily influence the direction of the Court,” particularly because there are currently two conservative justices and two liberal justices who are approaching retirement age. He maintains that if a Democratic president has the opportunity to replace one or two conservative justices, it will sharply tilt the Court to the left and probably be impossible to change that balance for twenty or thirty years. Likewise, if a Republican president gets to replace one or two liberal justices, it could reinforce the Court’s current conservative direction for another generation. Bolick points out that Supreme Court nominations increasingly reflect a president’s ideological stance and that when it comes to the differences in the ways that Republicans and Democrats interpret the Constitution, this can make a big difference in determining which of our rights are preserved or destroyed.
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Clint Bolick argues that in this election our vote will strongly influence both the White House and the Surpreme Court.

My oldest daughter is excited that she'll be voting for the first time this November. I'll tell her that her vote may count for double.

----------President Obama said last month that America can educate its way to prosperity if Congress sends money to states to prevent public school layoffs and "rehire even more teachers." Mitt Romney was having none of it, invoking "the message of Wisconsin" and arguing that the solution to our economic woes is to cut the size of government and shift resources to the private sector. Mr. Romney later stated that he wasn't calling for a reduction in the teacher force—but perhaps there would be some wisdom in doing just that.

Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.
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He goes on to argue that we are wasting $200 billion a year keeping three million teachers in public schools. He says we should release them to the greater US economy so they could be productive and contribute to growing the economy.

I do believe that both public schools and our economy would improve if the worse 10% of public school teachers were told to find other jobs.

Monday, July 09, 2012

At minute 3:22 Tanishq explains "Homeschooling is much better than normal regular school."

For Tanishq a normal public school would have been soul destroying.

His mother has a great line: "Sometimes when people ask what do you do for your fun time, he says I just learn, and people just don't understand that."

And the professor had a great observation about how there are so many programs for students which are learning impaired or hearing impaired, but there is nothing which really addresses those who are truely gifted.

----------The unique self-paced, competency-based model will allow students to start classes anytime and earn credit for what they already know. Students will be able to demonstrate college-level competencies based on material they already learned in school, on the job, or on their own, as soon as they can prove that they know it. By taking advantage of this high quality, flexibility model, and by utilizing a variety of resources to help pay for their education, students will have new tools to accelerate their careers. Working together, the UW System, the State of Wisconsin, and other partners can make a high-quality UW college degree significantly more affordable and accessible to substantially more people.

“This new model for delivering higher education will help us close the skills gap at an affordable price to get Wisconsin working again,” said Governor Walker. “As states across the country work to improve access and affordability in higher education, I am proud to support this exciting and innovative University of Wisconsin solution.”
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----------There is no dearth of impressive student projects here at the finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup in Sydney, but one of the six finalists that caught my attention was a project called EnableTalk by the Ukrainian team QuadSquad. There are currently about 40 million deaf, mute and deaf-mute people and many of them use sign language to communicate, but there are very few people who actually understand sign language. Using gloves fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers (as well as some solar cells to increase battery life) the EnableTalk team has built a system that can translate sign language into text and then into spoken words using a text-to-speech engine. The whole system then connects to a smartphone over Bluetooth.
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When I returned from my sojourn at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland on Tuesday after having the catheter out the previous day, I found a pile of mail waiting for me – the usual bills, a get-well card from a kind nephew, and so forth. Among the items was an issue of Inside Academe, which is published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA:www.goacta.org) – an outfit that serves a watchdog function with regard to the madness that has American higher education in its grip and that seeks to interest alumni and trustees in setting things straight.

On the third page was an article that caught my eye. It begins:

America’s higher-education accreditation system is broken. The current system – which forces schools to be certified by regional accreditors in order to receive federal money – was created to safeguard taxpayer dollars. But today it safeguards mediocrity and the status quo.

Once a school receives accreditation, it hardly ever loses that status, but new schools – especially innovative schools – often find it prohibitively difficult to obtain accreditation. The system misleads parents into believing that accreditation equals quality, and it wastes piles of money. Christopher Eisgruber, provost of Princeton University, testified that renewing accreditation can cost a single college or university over $1 million and hundreds of hours of staff time.

The claims advanced in these two paragraphs, in fact, understate the problem. The accreditation system was originally set up by colleges and universities with an eye to separating the sheep from the goats so that parents could have some idea of what they were getting into. The federal government had nothing to do with it. But the old order was hijacked a long time ago, and in the process yet another instrument was created for the micro-management by the federal government of entities that would not otherwise fall under its jurisdiction. The maneuver is simple. To get federal funding, a school must be accredited, and to get accreditation they must meet certain standards.

Thursday, July 05, 2012

About four years ago our readersselected three imagesto represent the Carnival of Homeschooling. I set things up so people who wanted to help support the carnival could copysome HTML codeto their blog or web site. The image would appear, along with a link back to the carnival.

----------Graphene. It can be stronger than steel and thinner than paper. It can generate electricity when struck by light. It can be used in thin, flexible supercapacitors that are up to 20 times more powerful than the ones we use right now and can be made in a DVD burner. It’s already got an impressive track record, but does it have any more tricks up its sleeve? Apparently, yes. According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude. Seriously, what can’t this stuff do?
Desalination might sound boring, but it’s super important. Around 97% of the planet’s water is saltwater and therefore unpotable, and while you can remove the salt from the water, the current methods of doing so are laborious and expensive. Graphene stands to change all that by essentially serving as the world’s most awesomely efficient filter. If you can increase the efficiency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude (that is to say, make it 100 to 1,000 times more efficient) desalination suddenly becomes way more attractive as a way to obtain drinking water.
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I frequently checkout Instapundit, by Glenn Reynolds. One of the topics he writes about is the high cost of higher education. The cost of going to college has risen twice as fast as inflation for decades.

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Parents of homeschoolers must own up to at least one things we all have in common: we worry. We want the very best for our children and we do everything we can to ensure that.

We research, read, discuss, debate, web surf, try new things, nearly going crazy trying to keep up with the newest statistics on homeschooling, not to mention the newest curriculum and material choices out there. The groups. The trips. The CASH spent. The doubts...

We fret and doubt and hope...and then it happens...the evidence!
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I once heard "That it isn't just the size of the stream that is important; it also important to have a big dam." The point just earning lots of money doesn't help if you spend it as fast as you earn it. Retaining a sizeable portion of what you earn and investing it pays huge dividends.

Monday, July 02, 2012

I have blogged a few times about new technology called Lab-on-a-chip. Currently in development this product will allow cheaper blood diagnostics. A
Forbes article I read years ago speculated that eventually we'd have dozens or
hundreds of tests on a single silicon chip for pennies and you could run tests
every day, at the same time you take your vitamins. There are a number of
dieases and conditions that if you catch them early are much more
manageable.

----------Each post performs its own genetic test, meaning you can not only find out whether you have malaria, but also determine the type of malaria and whether your DNA makes you resistant to certain antimalarial drugs. It takes less than an hour to process one chip, making it possible to screen large populations in a short time.

“That’s the real value proposition—being able to do multiple tests at the same time,” Acker said, adding that the Domino has been used in several recently published studies, showing similar accuracy to centralized labs.
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They are looking at a box that sells for $5,000, and each chip will cost only a couple dollars. This isn't quit the home model version, but we are getting there!

The Amazon Effect is a good article about the book publishing industry and the changes we've had over the last couple decades. The article is long, but worth reading.

The article starts:

----------From the start, Jeff Bezos wanted to “get big fast.” He was never a “small is beautiful” kind of guy. The Brobdingnagian numbers tell much of the story. In 1994, four years after the first Internet browser was created, Bezos stumbled upon a startling statistic: the Internet had been growing at the rate of 2,300 percent annually. In 1995, the year Bezos, then 31, started Amazon, just 16 million people used the Internet. A year later, the number was 36 million, a figure that would multiply at a furious rate. Today, more than 1.7 billion people, or almost one out of every four humans on the planet, are online. Bezos understood two things. One was the way the Internet made it possible to banish geography, enabling anyone with an Internet connection and a computer to browse a seemingly limitless universe of goods with a precision never previously known and then buy them directly from the comfort of their homes. The second was how the Internet allowed merchants to gather vast amounts of personal information on individual customers.
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----------The feeling of security and the reality of security don't always match, says computer-security expert Bruce Schneier. At TEDxPSU, he explains why we spend billions addressing news story risks, like the "security theater" now playing at your local airport, while neglecting more probable risks -- and how we can break this pattern.